Writer agrees: No cause for radiation fear here

March 24, 2011|By Roger Knutson Courier Columnist

For this week I was going to write about the widespread and needless fear of nuclear radiation prompted by the accidents with the Japanese nuclear power plants. I could hardly qualify as an expert, but I did once spend three months in Oak Ridge, Tenn. at the nuclear power and research facilities learning to safely handle all sorts of radiation-produced products.

Anything I would have been able to say was pretty much pre-empted by a front page story in the Petoskey News-Review based on information from Dr. Wolfgang Bauer of the department of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University. The Thursday, March 17, issue of the News-Review is well worth a look by anyone who seeking truth about nuclear radiation.

The answer to the question of how fearful we should be about the Japanese situation and our own nuclear power industry is clearly, "not very fearful." It is all too easy to induce fear when knowledge is unclear or confusing, and there is certainly a general lack of clarity and understanding about nuclear radiation.

While Dr. Bauer is very understandable, much of the physics establishment has not been helpful to the ordinary citizen. How much radiation is harmful is a perfectly good question, but the answers are often difficult. How radiation is measured is part of the same question. It is not helpful that so many different measures of radiation have been used over the years. I can at least provide a glossary of terms and measurements.

The first measure of nuclear radiation was introduced by Marie Curie who isolated radium, the first known radioactive element, for the first time. Until then science generally thought of atoms as indestructible and indivisible. Curie measured the tiny explosions of radium atoms and suggested that the proper unit for measurement could be called the curie. Formally it was 3.7 times ten to the tenth power (a very large number) Radium atoms disintegrating per second.

Then there was a millicurie which was 1/1000 as much and a microcurie which was 1/1,000,000 as much. The roentgen was used to measure the energy in x-rays and nuclear radiation. A roentgen measured the amount of chemical change produced by the radiation. Measuring the amount absorbed by people required a new unit the RAD, short for radiation absorbed dose. Later the REM (roentgen equivalent man) came closer to determining the effect on human beings. Currently the measure of choice and the one you are likely to see in newspaper reports is the sievert, named for the Swedish physicist R. M. sievert. If you are to be exposed to nuclear radiation of any sort, you want only to have exposure to a microsievert or possibly a milliseivert.

The damage to a human produced by exposure to microsieverts or possibly even millisieverts is mostly repaired over time, so the allowable dose is some number of microsieverts per year for workers in nuclear power facilities. Almost no one would suffer any noticeable effects over a lifetime of low-level exposure. Everyone on earth is more or less constantly exposed to some low-level of nuclear radiation, often called background radiation. Medical and dental x-rays are the largest exposure most of us ever have.

Should we be worried about any effects on the U.S. of the Japanese problems? Certainly not. Should we be in fear of the use of nuclear energy to produce electricity in ways that don't burn fossil fuels? Again, certainly not. Coal-fired power plants release hundreds of tons of mercury and arsenic into our atmosphere every year and produce far more important bad health effects than even the exceptionally rare accidents at nuclear power plants.

One of ecology's unbreakable rules is, "There is no such thing as a free lunch." If we want inexpensive, easily available electric power it will cost us. We need to know what the costs are. Even though we may fear the costs more, the cost in health and hazard are not higher for nuclear power.